Technology Trends in the Classroom

This has been a great month for coding fans both young and old, as we saw the launch of ScratchJr for little ones, the release of two wonderfully comprehensive and thoughtful curriculum guides, one for Scratch called Creative Computing, and the other to promote family coding experiences, called Family Creative Learning.¹In the past, coding has been a somewhat exclusive experience, requiring time and training in computer programming languages. Today, however, with applications like Scratch Jr and Scratch, young children and adults can code, or, as Mitch Resnick from the MIT Media Lab says, “learn to code and code to learn.” These research-based and developmentally-appropriate approaches to coding present new opportunities to engage learners in activities that focus on sequencing, design, sp...